There are a lot of benchmarks you can apply to different machines, and plenty of arguments you make about why one is better or worse than another. The solution to this dilemma is to run a broad spectrum of tests, and carefully examine the results. You don't get anywhere by running a handful of Photoshop plugins and calling it quits; you might as well test a person's intelligence by measuring their performance on the Computer Science GRE test. You also don't run silly comparisons between emulated and native code. Enough said.
Steve Jobs...
on
Mac Rants
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· Score: 3, Insightful
... certainly hasn't brought the company back to the top of the heap. But Scott has clearly forgotten how things were before Jobs got there. Performa anyone?
It's been said before, and I'll say it again. There's no excuse for giving 20 minutes to the silly pod-race scene, while Anakin leaving his mother lasted less than 2.
You conveniently skipped paying the artist I think, plus, like it or not, there is a whole lot of promotional expense involved in marketing these cheesy plastic platters.
Yes, what is the artists' cut again? A buck per CD (at best)? And how does that compare with the record companies' profit, considering that the artists picks up production out of his/her cut? I'm sure the label's profit margin averages no more than 10-20% of what the artist takes home (after expenses), correct?
plus, like it or not, there is a whole lot of promotional expense involved in marketing these cheesy plastic platters.
Yes, there is. Which is why the pop CDs mentioned above were selling for $11-$12 wholesale (ie, what the record company charges for them.) If record companies were competitive businesses, you can bet that they would be willing to give up some of the the pretty stiff profit margin and gross inefficiencies that made them even reach that price. Finally, how does the CD get from $11-12 to $17-18? According to the recent case, prices peaked because the labels conspired to keep retail prices high. Since Americans have been fooled into thinking that $17-18 is a reasonable price for a CD, there's no real incentive to seriously drop prices that much now (as long as the major retailers don't go to war.)
Better still, how about allowing 'burn in store'? Let people find the tracks they like, combine them onto one disc, and pay only for what _they_ (not some record company exec that hasn't listen to music in decades) think has real value.
Or better yet, how about breaking up those McDonald's combo meals into component parts where the total price of the components doesn't exceed the price of the meal? I never eat those fries. Or how about your cable company letting you save some dough by subscribing to only the channels you want without having to buy them in big packaged lumps?
The answer to all three questions is that companies can charge more by lumping in stuff you don't necessarily want, and selling it as a package. Most listeners only buy CDs for a couple of tracks (yes, there are many exceptions, but not enough to defeat the purpose.) The "CD model" allows record companies to charge significantly more than they could ever expect consumers to pay for singles, simply by including this extra material.
Record companies won't move to a burn-in-store or per-track model unless something forces them to. The revenue loss would trigger price increases, which would further aggravate the loss, and so on. Disaster.
When a program in XP crashes you are given the option of whether or not to upload crashdumps. I hit yes or no. If I hit yes it uploads it. If I hit no it does not.
One has to question Microsoft at this point. They include an automatic function that disables certain drivers instead of simply giving a warning message, based on the assumption that "most users don't read warning messages very carefully." Yet when the computer crashes, they believe that users will carefully consider what they're doing to their privacy when presented with a warning message?
Yes, but he gave a talk and explained out it works in the US.. that is illegal
The DMCA outlaws two things: "circumventing protections on copyrighted materials" and "manufacturinging/distributing (etc) circumvention devices."
Although Skylarov may be guilty of the latter, he committed these acts outside of US jurisdiction in a country whose laws do not forbid the practice. The former charge, circumventing the protection on a copyrighted work may or may not have been violated. Did he practice his technique in the US or did he just talk about it? And does that restriction (section 1201[a]: "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title") apply in all circumstances, or simply in circumstances where copyright is actually violated (should it apply in other circumstances?)
Finally, is Skylarov's talk exempted under section 1201[f], which specifically exempts "encryption research"? Of course this last is complicated by the fact that we must consider Skylarov's motivations for giving the talk, and assume that he made an effort to let Adobe know he was giving the talk (they certainly found out about it.) As far as I understood, in a case where an act is only criminal when committed with certain "motives", law enforcement officials are required to give a defendant the benefit of the doubt before making an arrest.
As for it hurting customers should The Mafia not be punished because it is likely to hurt other businesses?
Yes, but the Mafia isn't the exclusive provider of a product that 90+% of Americans (or at least, those who use computers) are addicted to. Of course, once upon a time the Mafia did have a monopoly on such a widely used product. Remember what happened? The only way the government prevailed was by widening production of said product (in many cases, by distributing it themselves.) Attempts to get rid of it altogether met with severe displeasure from the very citizens they were trying to protect.
My point is, as unpopular as Microsoft is, Windows is popular (largely for silly reasons, but I digress.) If you put MS out of business, or restrict them from producing Windows, the public is going to feel that they're being punished for Microsoft's transgressions. You really need a solution that allows Microsoft to exist, but limits their ability to do damage.
In this case, if there is no breakup, then a huge fine, say equal to most of their cash reserves, and a prohibition from releasing any new versions of Windows or other similar platform programs, such as their.NET effort for 4 or 5 years should be adequate.
I doubt that any cash penalty is going to be big enough to stop Microsoft (particularly after it's been reduced by appeals.) Furthermore, an attempt to prevent them from releasing future versions of Windows would be pretty flimsy and easily appealed (putting a company out of business isn't a fair penalty, nor is it necessarily good for consumers.) It would also be political suicide-- the DOJ wouldn't ask for any such thing, even if Bush wasn't in the White House. If you're looking for a way to make MS into the victim here, that's it.
The solution here has already been reached once. There needs to be a breakup. Preferably one that splits applications, OS and.NET among at least three separate entities. If MS is smart, they'll do it voluntarily once [if] they know they're beaten.
And regardless of how transparently a nanotechnological assembler works, there is some process between the information and the final product.
Often a technological process becomes so routine that it no longer needs to be considered: eg, copyright cases rarely pay much attention to the process of translating bits on a disk into words on a page-- it's simply assumed that the two things can be interchanged by some straightforward process and are therefore both representations of the same copyrighted document. At some point we decided to consider electronic materials copyrightable under the same laws protecting printed documents. Will we not do this again?
As an unrelated example, by focusing closely on the process you might conclude that hypertext links are no different from bibliographic citations, and should therefore be protected in exactly the same manner. But a judge decided that they should be treated differently simply because of the technology that underlies them and the way they operate to the user (mind you, he was a wacko and the decision ought to be reversed. but it may not be.)
If a copyrighted document can be encoded into a huge molecule, is the new representation still protected against duplication? If duplicating this molecule requires disassembling it back into an equivalent electronic representation, then re-encoding it, is copyright violated?
And as I recall, in The Diamond Age, "chaos" was avoided through the centralized control of replication systems. The great fear in that world was that someone would design a self-replicating machine. In any case, Stephenson's world relied on a very firmly-controlled system of IP protections. One has to wonder if such a world could actually exist.
Copyright does not, however, prevent someone from studying my documents and building their own refinery based on my design. I need a patent to protect against that. And the copyright certainly has nothing to do with the finished product.
Forget the process. What do you do when the physical representation (atoms linked into a specific configuration) is equivalent to the informational representation? For instance, if I make a printed book out of a copyrighted data file, does the copyright not protect the printed work? Similarly, if I make a physical substance out of an informational atomic pattern, does the copyright no longer protect the substance?
You might, of course, argue that the printed book is not what's protected by copyright law, it's simply the information expressed by the book that has restrictions placed upon it. But what about the information contained in a physical substance? If I redistribute the substance, am I violating copyright?
All questions we can't really answer, most of which will be made more complex by the continued expansion of IP protections.
In one place I lived, the nearest ABC affiliate was 2 states away. Attempts to convince DirectTV that the meaning of "local" was being stretched way out of proportion in this case were futile (I literally could have started walking in June and reached this station's home city in mid-August.)
Naturally, reception wasn't terribly clear. Regardless, DirectTV refused to offer us service without someone from the satellite store coming up and measuring the signal strength. Even then, if they determined it was "clear enough", we would have been outa luck.
Yes, there is always land-line cable. And it's a steal, due to the intense competition of all 19 of my local cable companies! This is not to mention the 16 companies providing me with satellite-based TV service. I change my provider every other week, based on their the rates and promotions they're offering. Ain't competition grand?
not relevant. simply talking about a bypass mechanism is now in a legal gray area.
Hmm. Remember back around the time of the first DeCSS case, when DMCA supporters made a big deal about how "computer code isn't really speech" and that enforcement of the circumvention clauses would never be extended to limit [real] speech?
Don't hear that line much anymore. Actually, it's probably a good thing. Let them push their way deep into First Amendment territory before it hits the SC.
Actually, this isn't a very exciting thing for the blind. For most practical uses, the visually impaired tend to prefer speed over quality. It doesn't have to sound great as long as it can read several times faster than "normal" speed. The AT&T TTS isn't really designed for this purpose.
Its main use is for telephony (surprise!) but it I suppose it'll be turning up in new and exciting places.
Generally I think that the station-identification problem affects smaller local channels and cable stations (eg TNN). I've often found that I can watch an entire movie I've recorded without ever noticing what network's Saturday Afternoon Movie I've just picked up. I would suggest that these networks do very short (5 second) station identification breaks at the beginning and end of commercial blocks; usually I'm not quick enough on the draw to miss these.
On the other hand, networks that have more popular and well-known shows won't have any problems. For instance, who can watch UPN without realizing it's UPN? Perhaps it's the grainy quality of the signal (even though I have cable) or maybe it's those ads for Special Unit 2. A crime-fighting dwarf is hard to miss even at max fast-forward.
Or the really scary one if you're an Open Souce fan: "We will use your kernel in our OS despite your objections, but we will pay you market price for it."
Actually, this seems perfectly reasonable. Yes, it would slightly dilute the efficacy of the GPL (and similar licenses), but the effect would be minimal. The GPL doesn't exist to prevent unpopular companies from using GPLed software, it exists to promote the redistribution of improved/modified code. While some people would certainly take advantage of compulsory licensing to circumvent the redistribution clauses, they would be doing so at great expense. The majority of developers would still obey the GPL simply because it would be cheaper to do so. This might even be a good thing for OSS projects, as many companies would be exposed to Open Source code where they previously wouldn't have gone near it. No matter what the effects, it sounds like this would be a reasonable tradeoff if it sorted out the copyright nightmare in this country.
But god knows who you would pay if you attempted to license an Open Source project. Just determining where to send the checks could make the entire enterprise unworkable.
This is not to mention the nasty radio ads they've been running in major cities. If I owned a business I'd be having some pretty serious thoughts about where I could make use of Free Software.
We cannot give these people an Internet that's good for their needs without throwing away the net as we have it now.
That's not true at all. The issue here is simply one of implementing QoS on the backbone, something that's almost inevitable. The problem only appears if you look at the division of bandwidth as a zero-sum game, when in fact it's anything but. There's more than enough fiber out there to support the bandwidth needs of high-reliability applications (video delivery, IP telephony etc.) without impinging on the amount of "unprioritized" bandwidth left over for services like the web.
The only real concern is that this prioritized service will be more expensive or less available than the average customer would like it to be. This might give AOL/TW the ability to deliver high-bandwidth content that say, Slashdot, couldn't afford to transmit. But so what? That's no different from the situation today, where the delivery of high quality video demands expensive, dedicated equipment. In fact, placing these capabilities in the backbone will almost certainly cause a precipitous drop in the cost of media distribution.
I understand that a lot of people would like to keep Paramount and Time Warner from using the net as a delivery vehicle because they're scared that it will degrade their service or increase the cost of net bandwidth. But I don't think this will be the case. And restricting the capability of the net is hardly the answer. Do we really think keeping the net technologically backward is any better (or even possible)?
that you think Apple is good because it makes mediocre software (allowing 3rd party developers a chance to sell stuff)
Mediocre is as mediocre does. Even with their near-monopoly on office software, software development software, etc, Microsoft still manages to make some pretty flaky apps.
I'm not sure about you, but Visual C++ doesn't hold a candle to some other development environments-- it's loaded with mysterious "Internal Compiler Errors" (is there an excuse for this?), a rotten interface (I'm sorry, but the window layout is terrible), and despite its "visual" nature, configuration often consists of typing command-line flags into a text box. Yet VC++ is the most commonly used compiler for Windows because MS makes it so much more convenient to use it with their particular libraries and poor APIs (think COM). Other companies have been pulling out of the market because they can't compete with the monstrosity (and because of MS's willingness to compete anyway the can to maintain a monopoly.)
Certainly, MS has poured zillions of dollars into Office and their other apps, but considering the massive, near-guaranteed profit margin, this isn't too impressive. And despite all that development money, they've created software that practically begs to be infected with simple VB/macro viruses created by ten-year olds. That's mediocre.
And please don't get me started on the Office Assistant. Didn't they kill that due to the near-universal response from their users? Why is it back in Office 2000? Why does word insist on capitalizing lowercase i for me by default? Does this company really pay attention to anything their users do? Do they have to?
but advocating a governtment breakup just because the product is best is WRONG and ruins business in this nation.
As far as I know, that's not at all the reason the government is thinking about breaking MS up. It has something to do with the fact that they drive competitors out of the market using illegal tactics and by leveraging their OS monopoly. You can certainly find a wealth of information on this subject if you look around the web for 10 minutes.
MS should be broken up not because their product is best, but simply because the meaning of "best" is suspect in a world where one company controls the OS market. There's not really a whole lot of incentive for other companies to work in that space and create better systems, because MS will crush them using any methods necessary. And of course, they regularly extend these methods to other areas of the software business.
Or put it this way: AT&T ran the "best" long-distance service in America for a long, long time. Fortunately, this silly argument didn't prevail-- it'd suck if we still had to pay $1/min for long distance.
If the two companies merge their cable operations, AOL would certainly be the driver
Really? Don't count on that-- AT&T's cable operation is significantly bigger than AOLTW's. AT&T already owns a chunk of Time Warner Cable, for that matter (and an even bigger chunk of @Home, which gives them a stake in keeping it alive). I don't see AT&T giving up complete control of anything to AOL.
I also do not feel that it is the web site's responsibility to raise your children.
Now, I'm not sure what Katz's intention was with this piece, but I think a lot of people fail to understand why someone who agrees with the above statement would make a stink about CBS producing this sort of content with one hand and pushing parents' panic buttons with the other.
It's not that I believe that CBS shouldn't have the right to air this programming. I simply believe that if CBS is going to talk the talk of Internet regulation/censorship, it shouldn't be right out there contributing to the "problem" with footage like this. And given the choice, I can tell you that I'd much rather have CBS airing their crappy reality violence than convincing half the parents in America that the Internet is a tool of Satan.
There's a big difference between a piece that points out CBS's hypocrisy and piece that rails against the unrestricted net. Now, if we could see more articles railing against unrestricted Reality TV...
Slashdot Mirror
There are a lot of benchmarks you can apply to different machines, and plenty of arguments you make about why one is better or worse than another. The solution to this dilemma is to run a broad spectrum of tests, and carefully examine the results. You don't get anywhere by running a handful of Photoshop plugins and calling it quits; you might as well test a person's intelligence by measuring their performance on the Computer Science GRE test. You also don't run silly comparisons between emulated and native code. Enough said.
... certainly hasn't brought the company back to the top of the heap. But Scott has clearly forgotten how things were before Jobs got there. Performa anyone?
It's been said before, and I'll say it again. There's no excuse for giving 20 minutes to the silly pod-race scene, while Anakin leaving his mother lasted less than 2.
Yes, what is the artists' cut again? A buck per CD (at best)? And how does that compare with the record companies' profit, considering that the artists picks up production out of his/her cut? I'm sure the label's profit margin averages no more than 10-20% of what the artist takes home (after expenses), correct?
plus, like it or not, there is a whole lot of promotional expense involved in marketing these cheesy plastic platters.
Yes, there is. Which is why the pop CDs mentioned above were selling for $11-$12 wholesale (ie, what the record company charges for them.) If record companies were competitive businesses, you can bet that they would be willing to give up some of the the pretty stiff profit margin and gross inefficiencies that made them even reach that price. Finally, how does the CD get from $11-12 to $17-18? According to the recent case, prices peaked because the labels conspired to keep retail prices high. Since Americans have been fooled into thinking that $17-18 is a reasonable price for a CD, there's no real incentive to seriously drop prices that much now (as long as the major retailers don't go to war.)
Or better yet, how about breaking up those McDonald's combo meals into component parts where the total price of the components doesn't exceed the price of the meal? I never eat those fries. Or how about your cable company letting you save some dough by subscribing to only the channels you want without having to buy them in big packaged lumps?
The answer to all three questions is that companies can charge more by lumping in stuff you don't necessarily want, and selling it as a package. Most listeners only buy CDs for a couple of tracks (yes, there are many exceptions, but not enough to defeat the purpose.) The "CD model" allows record companies to charge significantly more than they could ever expect consumers to pay for singles, simply by including this extra material.
Record companies won't move to a burn-in-store or per-track model unless something forces them to. The revenue loss would trigger price increases, which would further aggravate the loss, and so on. Disaster.
One has to question Microsoft at this point. They include an automatic function that disables certain drivers instead of simply giving a warning message, based on the assumption that "most users don't read warning messages very carefully." Yet when the computer crashes, they believe that users will carefully consider what they're doing to their privacy when presented with a warning message?
The DMCA outlaws two things: "circumventing protections on copyrighted materials" and "manufacturinging/distributing (etc) circumvention devices."
Although Skylarov may be guilty of the latter, he committed these acts outside of US jurisdiction in a country whose laws do not forbid the practice. The former charge, circumventing the protection on a copyrighted work may or may not have been violated. Did he practice his technique in the US or did he just talk about it? And does that restriction (section 1201[a]: "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title") apply in all circumstances, or simply in circumstances where copyright is actually violated (should it apply in other circumstances?)
Finally, is Skylarov's talk exempted under section 1201[f], which specifically exempts "encryption research"? Of course this last is complicated by the fact that we must consider Skylarov's motivations for giving the talk, and assume that he made an effort to let Adobe know he was giving the talk (they certainly found out about it.) As far as I understood, in a case where an act is only criminal when committed with certain "motives", law enforcement officials are required to give a defendant the benefit of the doubt before making an arrest.
Yes, but the Mafia isn't the exclusive provider of a product that 90+% of Americans (or at least, those who use computers) are addicted to. Of course, once upon a time the Mafia did have a monopoly on such a widely used product. Remember what happened? The only way the government prevailed was by widening production of said product (in many cases, by distributing it themselves.) Attempts to get rid of it altogether met with severe displeasure from the very citizens they were trying to protect.
My point is, as unpopular as Microsoft is, Windows is popular (largely for silly reasons, but I digress.) If you put MS out of business, or restrict them from producing Windows, the public is going to feel that they're being punished for Microsoft's transgressions. You really need a solution that allows Microsoft to exist, but limits their ability to do damage.
I doubt that any cash penalty is going to be big enough to stop Microsoft (particularly after it's been reduced by appeals.) Furthermore, an attempt to prevent them from releasing future versions of Windows would be pretty flimsy and easily appealed (putting a company out of business isn't a fair penalty, nor is it necessarily good for consumers.) It would also be political suicide-- the DOJ wouldn't ask for any such thing, even if Bush wasn't in the White House. If you're looking for a way to make MS into the victim here, that's it.
The solution here has already been reached once. There needs to be a breakup. Preferably one that splits applications, OS and .NET among at least three separate entities. If MS is smart, they'll do it voluntarily once [if] they know they're beaten.
Often a technological process becomes so routine that it no longer needs to be considered: eg, copyright cases rarely pay much attention to the process of translating bits on a disk into words on a page-- it's simply assumed that the two things can be interchanged by some straightforward process and are therefore both representations of the same copyrighted document. At some point we decided to consider electronic materials copyrightable under the same laws protecting printed documents. Will we not do this again?
As an unrelated example, by focusing closely on the process you might conclude that hypertext links are no different from bibliographic citations, and should therefore be protected in exactly the same manner. But a judge decided that they should be treated differently simply because of the technology that underlies them and the way they operate to the user (mind you, he was a wacko and the decision ought to be reversed. but it may not be.)
If a copyrighted document can be encoded into a huge molecule, is the new representation still protected against duplication? If duplicating this molecule requires disassembling it back into an equivalent electronic representation, then re-encoding it, is copyright violated?
And as I recall, in The Diamond Age, "chaos" was avoided through the centralized control of replication systems. The great fear in that world was that someone would design a self-replicating machine. In any case, Stephenson's world relied on a very firmly-controlled system of IP protections. One has to wonder if such a world could actually exist.
Forget the process. What do you do when the physical representation (atoms linked into a specific configuration) is equivalent to the informational representation? For instance, if I make a printed book out of a copyrighted data file, does the copyright not protect the printed work? Similarly, if I make a physical substance out of an informational atomic pattern, does the copyright no longer protect the substance?
You might, of course, argue that the printed book is not what's protected by copyright law, it's simply the information expressed by the book that has restrictions placed upon it. But what about the information contained in a physical substance? If I redistribute the substance, am I violating copyright?
All questions we can't really answer, most of which will be made more complex by the continued expansion of IP protections.
Naturally, reception wasn't terribly clear. Regardless, DirectTV refused to offer us service without someone from the satellite store coming up and measuring the signal strength. Even then, if they determined it was "clear enough", we would have been outa luck.
Yes, fortunately it was only ABC.
Yes, there is always land-line cable. And it's a steal, due to the intense competition of all 19 of my local cable companies! This is not to mention the 16 companies providing me with satellite-based TV service. I change my provider every other week, based on their the rates and promotions they're offering. Ain't competition grand?
Hmm. Remember back around the time of the first DeCSS case, when DMCA supporters made a big deal about how "computer code isn't really speech" and that enforcement of the circumvention clauses would never be extended to limit [real] speech?
Don't hear that line much anymore. Actually, it's probably a good thing. Let them push their way deep into First Amendment territory before it hits the SC.
The fact that it required a course for you to understand basic ethics tells me that... oh hell, I don't know.
Its main use is for telephony (surprise!) but it I suppose it'll be turning up in new and exciting places.
On the other hand, networks that have more popular and well-known shows won't have any problems. For instance, who can watch UPN without realizing it's UPN? Perhaps it's the grainy quality of the signal (even though I have cable) or maybe it's those ads for Special Unit 2. A crime-fighting dwarf is hard to miss even at max fast-forward.
Actually, this seems perfectly reasonable. Yes, it would slightly dilute the efficacy of the GPL (and similar licenses), but the effect would be minimal. The GPL doesn't exist to prevent unpopular companies from using GPLed software, it exists to promote the redistribution of improved/modified code. While some people would certainly take advantage of compulsory licensing to circumvent the redistribution clauses, they would be doing so at great expense. The majority of developers would still obey the GPL simply because it would be cheaper to do so. This might even be a good thing for OSS projects, as many companies would be exposed to Open Source code where they previously wouldn't have gone near it. No matter what the effects, it sounds like this would be a reasonable tradeoff if it sorted out the copyright nightmare in this country.
But god knows who you would pay if you attempted to license an Open Source project. Just determining where to send the checks could make the entire enterprise unworkable.
This is not to mention the nasty radio ads they've been running in major cities. If I owned a business I'd be having some pretty serious thoughts about where I could make use of Free Software.
That's not true at all. The issue here is simply one of implementing QoS on the backbone, something that's almost inevitable. The problem only appears if you look at the division of bandwidth as a zero-sum game, when in fact it's anything but. There's more than enough fiber out there to support the bandwidth needs of high-reliability applications (video delivery, IP telephony etc.) without impinging on the amount of "unprioritized" bandwidth left over for services like the web.
The only real concern is that this prioritized service will be more expensive or less available than the average customer would like it to be. This might give AOL/TW the ability to deliver high-bandwidth content that say, Slashdot, couldn't afford to transmit. But so what? That's no different from the situation today, where the delivery of high quality video demands expensive, dedicated equipment. In fact, placing these capabilities in the backbone will almost certainly cause a precipitous drop in the cost of media distribution.
I understand that a lot of people would like to keep Paramount and Time Warner from using the net as a delivery vehicle because they're scared that it will degrade their service or increase the cost of net bandwidth. But I don't think this will be the case. And restricting the capability of the net is hardly the answer. Do we really think keeping the net technologically backward is any better (or even possible)?
Mediocre is as mediocre does. Even with their near-monopoly on office software, software development software, etc, Microsoft still manages to make some pretty flaky apps.
I'm not sure about you, but Visual C++ doesn't hold a candle to some other development environments-- it's loaded with mysterious "Internal Compiler Errors" (is there an excuse for this?), a rotten interface (I'm sorry, but the window layout is terrible), and despite its "visual" nature, configuration often consists of typing command-line flags into a text box. Yet VC++ is the most commonly used compiler for Windows because MS makes it so much more convenient to use it with their particular libraries and poor APIs (think COM). Other companies have been pulling out of the market because they can't compete with the monstrosity (and because of MS's willingness to compete anyway the can to maintain a monopoly.)
Certainly, MS has poured zillions of dollars into Office and their other apps, but considering the massive, near-guaranteed profit margin, this isn't too impressive. And despite all that development money, they've created software that practically begs to be infected with simple VB/macro viruses created by ten-year olds. That's mediocre.
And please don't get me started on the Office Assistant. Didn't they kill that due to the near-universal response from their users? Why is it back in Office 2000? Why does word insist on capitalizing lowercase i for me by default? Does this company really pay attention to anything their users do? Do they have to?
As far as I know, that's not at all the reason the government is thinking about breaking MS up. It has something to do with the fact that they drive competitors out of the market using illegal tactics and by leveraging their OS monopoly. You can certainly find a wealth of information on this subject if you look around the web for 10 minutes.
MS should be broken up not because their product is best, but simply because the meaning of "best" is suspect in a world where one company controls the OS market. There's not really a whole lot of incentive for other companies to work in that space and create better systems, because MS will crush them using any methods necessary. And of course, they regularly extend these methods to other areas of the software business.
Or put it this way: AT&T ran the "best" long-distance service in America for a long, long time. Fortunately, this silly argument didn't prevail-- it'd suck if we still had to pay $1/min for long distance.
Really? Don't count on that-- AT&T's cable operation is significantly bigger than AOLTW's. AT&T already owns a chunk of Time Warner Cable, for that matter (and an even bigger chunk of @Home, which gives them a stake in keeping it alive). I don't see AT&T giving up complete control of anything to AOL.
Now, I'm not sure what Katz's intention was with this piece, but I think a lot of people fail to understand why someone who agrees with the above statement would make a stink about CBS producing this sort of content with one hand and pushing parents' panic buttons with the other.
It's not that I believe that CBS shouldn't have the right to air this programming. I simply believe that if CBS is going to talk the talk of Internet regulation/censorship, it shouldn't be right out there contributing to the "problem" with footage like this. And given the choice, I can tell you that I'd much rather have CBS airing their crappy reality violence than convincing half the parents in America that the Internet is a tool of Satan.
There's a big difference between a piece that points out CBS's hypocrisy and piece that rails against the unrestricted net. Now, if we could see more articles railing against unrestricted Reality TV...